My collections of poems include Evidences (2003 recipient of the APR-Honickman First Book Award), The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press 2014), and In Time (Etruscan Press, 2020). Two new award-winning collections are forthcoming in 2027: Seven Cycles (Omnidawn) and Ontario (Interim/University of Nevada Press). I am also the recipient of Ingram Merrill and NEA Fellowships in poetry. My poems have appeared in APR, The Bennington Review, Chant de la Sirene, Conjunctions, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Raritan, The Red Wheelbarrow, The Seneca Review, and many others.

I was born in St. Petersburg, Florida and received my M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop, at the University of Iowa, where I studied with Jane Cooper, Donald Justice, Larry Levis, and Sandra McPherson. I also received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, where I studied with Gerald Bruns, Ed Folsom, Donald Marshall, Frederick McDowell, Adalaide Morris, and Oliver Steele. I am the author of the study of postmodern American poetry, The Still Performance (University of Virginia Press, 1989) and the editor of Conversant Essays: Contemporary Poets on Poetry (Wayne State University Press, 1990). I was also a co-editor, with Jeffery Gray and Mary Balkun, of two encyclopedias of American poets and poetry from Greenwood, published in 2005 and 2015.

My essays and presentations focus on such poets, novelists, and visual artists as Will Alexander, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Bogin, Hart Crane, Rachel Carson, J.M. Coetzee, C.S. Giscombe, Glenn Ligon, Anselm Kiefer, Audre Lorde, Claude McKay, W.S. Merwin, m. nourbeSe philip, Adrienne Rich, and Charles Wright, with especial attention to eco-poetics, memory, and the history of race and the diaspora. I have been involved in local activism, especially in support of Palestinian rights and anti-war efforts. For many years I co-directed the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.